Downtown Yorkton has a rich and captivating history that many people are not aware exists. Broadway and Back, a new video walking tour has been launched by the city to guide people around the city’s downtown area, available online at the city’s website at www.yorkton.ca/history.
Developed by Carter Yont, the interactive tour combines modern day video with historic archives, guiding people to important landmarks and telling the story of the history of Yorkton’s downtown. The tour starts at the corner of Myrtle and Broadway, travels through the downtown on to City Centre Park.
Yont says that the goal of the new tour is to bring the walking tour to a younger audience. A combination of video and a mobile phone responds to how people interact with technology now and makes a walking tour easy to access.
“It’s so that more people will be able to access the walking tours. Generally when you talk about walking tours, people go “oh, that’s for people who are over 50,” but this is a way to get history in the hands of the younger generation.”
The process of making the video has lead to Yont learning more about the history of the city herself, from learning about the three city halls which Yorkton has used to all the disasters that have struck the city, including a multitude of fires over the years.
“There are a lot of really cool things about Yorkton that I didn’t know about. I’ve always liked Yorkton, but there is so much more to the history than I thought.”
Yont hopes that the tour can help people appreciate the city’s history, and become more active in keeping historic sites around.
“Hindsight is 20/20, and if we can stress the importance of the buildings that we still have we can hopefully keep them in the city. A lot of the buildings on Broadway are gone, we have taken them down, and they were beautiful buildings, but just for whatever reason they didn’t make it.”
It has also become a historic document of its own, as the constant change in the downtown of the city has meant that it already looks different from when Yont captured her footage. Buildings have been renovated and changed dramatically already, and will continue to do so.
Yont hopes that she will be able to do more tours, as there is a rich history to explore in Yorkton.
“There is so much history, we only covered a smidgen... less than a sixteenth of the history.”
